Randal Schwartz, the roving Perl News reporter is back with a summary of what is new in the world of Perl as of September 19th, 2006.
Conferences, Workshops and User Groups
YAPC NA and EU 2007 Locations Announced
Congratulations to Houston, Texas and Vienna, Austria who have just been announced as the venues for YAPC::NA and YAPC::EU in 2007. Both winning groups faced stiff competition from the likes of Boston, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Lyon, France, and Pisa, Italy.
It’s really exciting to see so much competition for YAPC venues. Runners-up need not get discouraged, you already have your proposal for next year!
Pittsburgh Perl Workshop
The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is quickly approaching. The one-day workshop deemed “Perl at Work” is Saturday September 23rd at Carnage Mellon University in Pittsburgh, P. Register today at pghpw.org. Also when tagging blogs, photos, and other media related to the conference please use the tag “PPW06″. And finally, be sure to visit wiki.pghpw.org to keep up with conference happenings and to sign up for post-conference social events.
First Firenze.pm Technical meeting
Firenze Perl Mongers are having a technical meeting on Thursday September 28th. The meeting will be hosted by Dada Spa in Firenze, Italy. Talks include and IPW2006 debriefing, Perl::Tags, and Test-driven programming. If you’ll be in the Firenze area on the 28th consider giving a talk or at least stopping by to make the a great initial meeting. More information can be found at firenze.pm.org
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The Dutch Perl Workshop 2007
There are rumblings of the organization of a Dutch Perl Workshop in February or March 2007. Please let the organizers know if you’d like to participate in the workshop, especially if you’d be willing to speak. The website for the 2006 Dutch Perl Workshop is workshop.perlpromo.nl.
CPAN
CPAN::Forum RSS Feeds for PAUSEID
CPAN::Forum has been recently updated. The change that might be the most important, especially for module authors, is that from now anyone can subscribe to e-mail alerts or RSS feeds based on PAUSEID. That includes that author’s future modules as well.
If you are wondering what CPAN::Forum is, it is a web forum for discussing Perl’s CPAN modules, asking questions, making comments, and helping other users with issues specific to a module. Check out www.cpanforum.com for more information.
CPAN.pm adds support for CPAN::Reporter
As of version 1.87_57, CPAN.pm has support for CPAN::Reporter. CPAN::Reporter is an add-on for the CPAN.pm module that uses Test::Reporter to send the results of module tests to the CPAN Testers project. Consult the CPAN::Reporter POD for details on installation and usage.
cpan6 – moving forward
Mark Overmeer gave a talk at YAPC::Europe 2006 about cpan6. The talk was generally well received has encouraged opening up the debate on CPAN for Perl6 to a wider audience and the beginnings of implementation.
The Perl community is invited to join either the pause6 mailing list for infrastructure discussions and/or the cpan6 tools list for client-side installers and upload tools.
AxKit2 v1.1 Release
The AxKit development team announced AxKit2 version 1.1. AxKit2 is the second generation XML Application Server. AxKit makes content generation easy by providing powerful tools to push XML through stylesheets. This helps ensure your web applications don’t suffer from XSS bugs, and provides standardized templating tools so that your template authors don’t need to learn new Perl templating tools.
Interfacing with USPS
Business-USPS-WebTools is a new distribution on CPAN that allows you to interact with the US Postal Service’s Web Tools. The distribution interfaces with the web services officially offered by the USPS. The current services available include the Address Information services: Address Standardization, Zip Code Lookup, and City/State Lookup. The only catch is that you’ll need an account with USPS to actually use the service. Details can be found in the Business-USPS-WebTools POD.
Core Perl
News from P5P
Perl 5.9.4 is out in the wild. It includes quite a few changes, some of which are incompatible with previous versions of Perl. These changes include:
- A bareword argument to chdir() is now recognized as a file handle. Earlier releases interpreted the bareword as a directory name.
- An old feature of perl is that before “require” or “use” look for a file with a .pm extension, they will first look for a similar filename with a .pmc extension. If this file isfound, it will be loaded in place of any potentially existing file ending in a .pm extension. Previously, .pmc files were loaded only if more recent than the matching .pm file. Starting with 5.9.4, they’ll be always loaded if they exist.
- The special arrays “@-” and “@+” are no longer interpolated in regular expressions.
- If you call a subroutine by a tainted name, and if it defers to an AUTOLOAD function, then $AUTOLOAD will be (correctly) tainted.
Also, there where four modules added to core:
- Module::Build
- Module::Load
- Hash::Util::FieldHash
- Win32API::File
Books
“Minimal Perl” book has been released
Tim Maher’s book entitled “Minimal Perl: for UNIX and Linux People” has just been released from Manning. Its mission is to show readers “How to do the most with the least” while using Perl in UNIX/Linux (and related) environments. For additional details, see MinimalPerl.com and manning.com.
